A Parallel Full Core Transport Calculation Based On Domain Decomposition Method

Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives, Direction de l’Energie Nucléaire, Service d’Etudes de Réacteurs et de Mathématiques Appliquées, CEA de Saclay, DEN/DANS/DM2S/SERMA/LTSD, 91190 Gif sur Yvette, CEDEX France

^* e-mail: roland.lenain@cea.fr, emiliano.masiello@cea.fr, richard.sanchez@cea.fr, frederic.damian@cea.fr

Abstract

A new interactive homogenization procedure for reactor core or colorset calculations is proposed that requires iterative transport assembly and diffusion core calculations. At each iteration the transport solution of every assembly is used to produce homogenized cross sections for the core calculation. The converged solution gives assembly fine multigroup transport fluxes that preserve macrogroup assembly exchanges in the core. This homogenization avoids the periodic lattice - leakage model approximation and gives detailed assembly transport fluxes without need for an approximated flux reconstruction. In this paper we combined the benefit of a Domain Decomposition Method, that split the original transport problem in several multigroup fixed-source problems, with the effective solution of the Coarse-Mesh Finite-Differences operator that provides the whole-core eigenvalue and the neutron exchange between assemblies.